PHP Fog Offers PHP Developers a Cloud Platform

It’s been a busy month in the cloud. PHP Fog has announced the general availability of its PHP PaaS joining Red Hat’s OpenShift multi-language PaaS announcement.

PaaS.. It’s Not Just for Ruby Anymore

PHP Fog introduced its PHP PaaS at Under the Radar, and now the platform is publicly available. According to the company,

Today we had over 13,000 people on our waiting list, deployed over 4,500 PHP applications and served hundreds of gigabytes of data. “Had” because as of today we are officially open to the public. Every one of those 13,000 people have been invited and now anyone can sign up any time.”

Last week when the service was introduced, four pricing levels were offered ranging from free with 100mb of storage to platinum for $US 249 with 100gb of storage and bandwidth per month. However, the company has added an enterprise offering designed for users with even higher service and availability needs.

Unlike other PHP PaaS offerings such as RightScale’s Zend-based PHP PaaS, Orchestra and cloudControl, PHP Fog offers an app store, which lets users create Drupal and WordPress sites without coding. Developers are obviously enticed, because the company reports adding 1,000 users per day for the last week.

Affected by Amazon

PHP Fog is built on Amazon’s cloud services (IaaS) and was impacted by the recent downtime. The company is providing existing users a free upgrade as a result of the outage. Customers are receiving:

Additional redundancy

Automatic caching failover

A database slave

Dashboard monitoring

at no charge in effort to build user good will. The upgrades, which are being phased in, require no downtime and no changes to applications.

PHP is estimated to be the development technology used for over one-third of websites, but there are more PaaS offerings in languages like Ruby. PHP Fog is tapping into a very large and active market of developers; the market size is sure to attract more competitors very quickly.